


breathe the air, slam the door

by brinnanza



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, crowley talks to god or possibly just francis mcdormand, maybe a tiiiiny whiff of aziraphale/crowley right at the end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-27
Updated: 2019-06-27
Packaged: 2020-05-20 23:28:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19386619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brinnanza/pseuds/brinnanza
Summary: “Lovely day, isn’t it?” says a friendly, American voice.Crowley looks up from his mobile to find someone has joined him on the park bench, where he’s been waiting for Aziraphale to tear himself away from his newly restored bookshop for lunch. She’s an older woman, thin, with a polite smile and halo of curly hair that’s gone grey. Her eyes are very blue, and there’s something vaguely familiar about her, like she’s someone Crowley had seen once a long time ago or maybe in a film he can’t quite recall.





	breathe the air, slam the door

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for [this prompt](https://tadfield-advertiser.dreamwidth.org/517.html?thread=108549#cmt108549) on the Tadfield Advertiser, which asked for Crowley talking to God and getting a reply. Title is from Queen's "Leaving Home Ain't Easy".

“Lovely day, isn’t it?” says a friendly, American voice. 

Crowley looks up from his mobile to find someone has joined him on the park bench, where he’s been waiting for Aziraphale to tear himself away from his newly restored bookshop for lunch. She’s an older woman, thin, with a polite smile and halo of curly hair that’s gone grey. Her eyes are very blue, and there’s something vaguely familiar about her, like she’s someone Crowley had seen once a long time ago or maybe in a film he can’t quite recall. 

Ordinarily Crowley would make a noncommittal noise in reply and return to his mobile, but there’s something in her presence that begs engagement. He could ignore her, but he finds, rather strangely, that he doesn’t want to.

And besides, it is a lovely day: the sort of warm, late summer day where the air has a bit of a bite to it, like it’s flirting with tipping into autumn a bit early.The sky is blue and cloudless overhead, and shade spills cool and inviting beneath the canopy of the nearby trees. 

“It is,” Crowley agrees. The clear sky holds no trace of the heavy clouds that had nearly marked the end of the world. Little by little, he thinks, he is finally starting to unwind from the tight knot of panic the almost-Armageddon and its consequences had forced him into, like a morning glory blooming in the first light of dawn. “Rather a nice change of pace.” 

The woman hums in agreement and settles back against the bench to watch a group of children throw breadcrumbs to the ducks in the pond. Their parents stand a little ways away around a couple of prams, alternately conversing and turning to shout at the children. “Still,” the woman beside Crowley says, “I think everything worked out for the best, don’t you?”

Crowley is pretty sure she’s not talking about the weather. “Quite a lot of bother to get there,” he says, and he’s not talking about the weather either. It seems fitting, somehow, that he should meet her here, on Earth amidst St. James’s various cultural attachés. Neutral ground. 

He turns toward her and holds out a hand. “Crowley.”

“Oh, I’m quite aware, my dear,” she says, giving him an enigmatic smile. “Please call me Francis.” She shakes his hand with a firm, dry grip, her skin warm against Crowley’s palm. She lingers just a hair longer than a handshake should, and when she withdraws, her fingers trail over Crowley’s palm like a caress. He half-expects it to burn, and maybe it does a bit, like the sudden warmth of a crackling flame in bitter cold.

“Francis,” Crowley repeats. The corner of his mouth twitches up, partway between a smirk and an amused smile. “And what brings you to London, Francis?” 

“Thought I’d call on… an old friend,” Francis says. “What brings you to St. James, Crowley?”

Crowley shrugs. “Waiting on an old friend. You’re not who I expected.”

Francis gives him another enigmatic smile. “I suppose I rarely turn out to be what’s expected.”

They watch the children and the ducks for a while. A little boy with a shock of blonde hair shoves another little girl who’s barely toddling to the ground and then laughs. His mother shouts a half-hearted protest but doesn’t break away from her conversation, and the little girl picks herself up from the dirt.

“They were going to burn him, you know,” Crowley says, unable to keep up the pretense any longer. His voice is casual, conversational. “Your lot. Wanted to burn him right out of existence for daring to love. I expect it from my lot, but I thought yours were supposed to be better. Merciful.”

“Come now,” Francis says, “you know better than that. You’re all my lot.”

Crowley fights the impulse to cross his arms, to huff like an impudent child. Everything has changed, and yet nothing has. “Seems like that makes you responsible for twice as much misery.”

Francis sighs. “You never needed to eat the apple to Know, Crowley,” she says gently. “You’ve known from the start that there’s no such thing as good and evil. It’s only ever been people making choices.”

Crowley pulls a knee up to his chest and wraps his arms around himself, a poor substitute for the comforting coils of a snake. “I didn’t choose,” he says. He means to spit the words at her, to hiss them like a warning, but it comes out too soft, plaintive. 

“Didn’t you?”

“You think I would _choose_ this?” Crowley’s voice breaks, and abruptly he’s blinking back tears, six thousand years and an endless stretch of time before time crowding in his too-tight throat. “You _abandoned_ me.”

“Oh, my perfect darling, no,” Francis says, reaching forward to cup his face in her hands. Crowley’s eyes slip closed and he leans into her touch, a perverse benediction that he can’t stop. Her thumbs brush over his cheekbones, and then she presses a soft kiss to his forehead. 

“I never left you, Crowley,” she says. “The sun doesn’t abandon the Earth just because you sit in the shade a while.” She draws back to peer at him, folding her hands in her lap, and Crowley’s skin is cool with the absence of her touch. “Tell me, do you regret Falling? Truly?”

Crowley remembers Heaven. Remembers being bathed in the warmth of Her grace, remembers the joy of creation. He remembers a column of hellfire and cold, violet eyes; an endless, empty expanse and the pretense of mercy. “No,” he admits.

There’s something almost like pride in Francis’s eyes. “And if you were given the chance, would you rejoin the Host? Would you come home?”

Crowley’s inhales slowly, breathes in the sharp, fresh scent of cut grass and earth, lets the sound of honking ducks and the breeze through the trees and pram wheels on the paved walking path of the park wash over him like the tide. “I am home.”

“So you are,” Francis agrees, like that’s the end of it. 

But it’s not, it _can’t_ be, not after all this time. Not after the flood, a carpenter in Galilee, six thousand years of silence, unanswered questions and desperate pleas falling on deaf ears. “It _hurts_ ,” he says raggedly, one leg tapping out a nervous drumbeat on the ground. “Why does it have to _hurt_ so much? All I ever did was ask.”

There’s a twist in Francis’s lip, something vaguely penitent in her expression. “That’s the first lesson, my love, and the hardest.” She reaches over to give Crowley’s knee a little squeeze. “Knowledge isn’t painless.”

It’s not an answer. Not really. But it is a response, and that’s far more than Crowley thought he might receive. There is too much scar tissue built up in his heart for forgiveness, far too many missteps for trust, but there is something warm within him, a spark of peace in the desolation of his Fall.

They lapse into silence once more, and Crowley tips his head back to gaze up into the azure sky. Questions buzz impatient under his skin, all of his doubts and fears and curiosities vying for escape. There is so much he wants to know, so much more to ask. Eventually, he settles for the one he can’t not voice. “What if it hadn’t worked?”

“Hmm?”

“Armageddon. If Adam hadn’t turned out to be so… human. Would you really have let it all happen? Let the Earth be destroyed?” 

Francis just smiles at him, infuriatingly inscrutable. “How fortunate that we don’t have cause to know.” She pats his knee and then pushes up from the bench. “Here comes that angel of yours now,” she says, tilting her head towards where Aziraphale is making his way toward them. 

She gives Aziraphale a cheery wave, which the angel returns with brows furrowed in confusion, and then she turns back to Crowley. She’s wearing a smile of an altogether different sort now, fond and knowing. “Don’t let him go too slow,” she says, tilting her head toward Aziraphale. 

Crowley turns his own fond, indulgent smile toward Aziraphale, sunlight blooming warm within him. Whether it takes Aziraphale another six thousand years or six minutes, Crowley will wait for him.

When he looks back, Francis is gone.


End file.
